The Siege

by Stephen White

  “Had I known you were coming, I would’ve sent my chopper.”

  Dee smiled at him. “Cute. For some reason I have trouble visualizing you and The Donald comparing helicopter woes.” She leaned over and gave him a soft kiss. “I have some new information, theories about the unsub, background about the families of the kids in the tomb. Interesting pattern. Not surprising, but interesting.”

  “How?”

  “Can’t say.”

  Poe knew that “can’t say” meant G.B. Jerry.

  Poe’s beer bottle arrived already sweating like Shaq’s cranium in the final minute of OT. The barkeep snapped a rocks glass down in front of Dee and free-poured her scotch with a steady hand. The ginger ale came last. It wasn’t from the beverage gun. It was a cute little bottle of Canada Dry.

  Old school.

  It had a screw top. Almost old school.

  Poe said, “I’m listening, my lady.” Poe wanted to hear Dee’s impressions before he told her what he learned from his out-of-town cop.

  She exhaled audibly. She dipped her chin and allowed the gravity of the day to subdue her tone until it was a gravelly whisper scented with wafts of whiskey and promises of intimacy. “There’s a lot of attention being paid to the usual suspects. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, splinter groups from Sudan or Yemen or Indonesia, even Morocco or Tunisia, exports from the likes of Lashkar-e-Taiba, even some possible minor players from Morocco and Tunisia. Government sponsorship from Iran or Syria. Or it could be a new threat from South America. Rebels from Venezuela, Peru. The list goes on. We know nothing about the guy, so we can’t rule anyone out. No surprises. You know everyone on our list, Poe.”

  “I admit I do have the Death to America roster memorized. But you’re not convinced it’s even the right list, Dee. I can tell.”

  She pushed her hair back and tucked it behind her ear. “The prevailing analysis links this straight to Iraq. So far today we’ve had a suicide bomber, a slit throat with a body left ‘on the street,’ a sniper victim, an IED casualty. Each victim, each method is a clear echo of some phase of the Iraq War. Many of my colleagues think it’s an Iraqi national in there. Maybe an ex-prisoner from Abu Ghraib. More likely a Sunni than a Shia. Others think it may be a U.S. vet. A disturbed vet. One of us. Playing out some vision of hell he knows all too well.”

  Poe sipped some beer. “You buying any of it?” He knew she wasn’t.

  “The analyses are defendable.”

  That, Poe knew, was an ambivalent wife’s weak endorsement of her husband’s current analytical prowess. He said, “You’re damning with faint praise. Which means you’re not convinced. What does ‘I am America’ mean? What was that about?”

  “I’ve heard a half dozen theories.”

  “I only need to hear one, baby. Sing me the song that gives you chills.”

  “Look at me. See yourself.”

  Poe turned his head, looked at Dee. He didn’t see himself. She laughed at the confused expression in his eyes.

  “That’s what ‘I am America’ means, Poe. He’s telling us he’s not different from us. That he is like us. He is us. What he’s doing is what we’re doing.”

  “Slaughtering innocents? Come on.”

  “Step back from your anger. Step back from your fatigue. You can’t know the enemy if you won’t plant your feet where his are and see what the world looks like from where he stands.”

  Poe gave it some thought. “That’s a scary one, babe,” he said. “Shit. I think I’m too tired to guess where you’re going.” He pushed the outside of his thigh against hers. “What on earth are you thinking?”

  “You saw the final speech tonight? The one the kid in his underwear gave before he was released?”

  “I saw it.”

  “That was your unsub’s explanation for ‘I am America.’ That little speech? It’s a version of what we said when our bombs went slightly off target in Baghdad during Shock and Awe. It’s what we say each time one of the missiles we fire from our Predators accidentally kills civilians in Pakistan. It’s what Israel said a few months ago in Gaza during the New Year’s invasion, to criticism they were using phosphorus around civilian populations.”

  Poe held his beer bottle like a TV reporter would hold a microphone. He said, “I am here with Deirdre Drake from the Central Intelligence Agency.” He tilted the bottle closer to Dee. In his best network correspondent impersonation, he said, “Ms. Drake, who is it? Tell the American people—who is in that tomb?”

  Dee pushed the bottle away. She said, “I don’t know, Poe. I don’t know who is in there. I do know this isn’t about trading hostages. Not in a traditional sense. He’s letting too many of his hostages go. And I know it’s not about revenge. Same reason. Pure retribution would mean pure slaughter. Without more evidence, we’re left with a frustrating conundrum.”

  “Which is?”

  “The list of people that America has pissed off recently is too long. It would be easier for me to tell you who is not inside that tomb than to tell you who is.”

  Poe put the bottle on the bar. He said, “We’re on the same page. You and me.”

  Dee said, “Unfortunately, the page I’m looking at is mostly blank. Now you tell me something—what does HRT do now? Do they attempt a breach despite the defenses the unsub has in place? How do you read it? What options are available? Which ones are viable?”

  “No breach tonight, apparently. The government has more toys at its disposal,” Poe said. “I gare-an-tee”—Poe inflected the word like a Cajun might because he still wanted to hear Dee laugh, but she wasn’t amused by his accent—“that they are still trying to see inside those walls. There could be some specially equipped Predator circling over us right now. I’m not in the loop on the latest and greatest technology, but the army has developed all kinds of new shit to peer into stone houses in Iraq and Afghanistan so they can track whoever it is they’re tracking over there. Secretary of the army’s kid is still inside that tomb. You can bet that any of the new whiz-bang army toys are potentially in play on this.

  “And I doubt they’ve ruled out using paralyzing agents. Something that would put everybody down, unsubs and hostages alike. If they do that, they’d have to instantly initiate a highly destructive breach on part of the building that isn’t wired—which basically means putting a tank through the wall and praying the place doesn’t collapse. Then they rush the medics in and hope they’re fast enough with triage to save the kids. Using sedatives and paralytics is high-risk stuff, but you never know, at some point it may look better than the alternatives. The bureaucratic tolerance has to be diminishing for watching kids get marched outside those doors and murdered.”

  “For the drugs? How?” Dee asked. “How do they get the drugs in? No windows. Roof’s protected.”

  “Getting gas into the tomb is doable. They could feed it in through the roof vents—though the unsub might detect any activity up there—but more likely they’d go in through the sewers. They’d snake a tube in through the waste lines and then into the bathrooms or kitchens through the toilets or sink drains. They can get microphones and cameras in that way. Those could already be in place. That’s pretty standard, straightforward stuff for HRT. They call them ‘crap cams.’”

  She lifted the scotch, touched the glass to her lips. “You didn’t hear this from me, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “Crap cam’s been tried and failed. They have no video inside that building. No viable audio. Virtually no intel. He’s been prepared for everything they’ve tried.”

  “That complicates things.”

  “The released hostages aren’t talking. Nothing.”

  Poe said, “I’m not surprised by that. Their friends have been threatened.”

  Poe wondered which betrayal was harder for Dee. Was it pretending she was his wife and bribing a housekeeper so that she could drop her purple bra on the floor of his hotel room? Or was it passing along intelligence that her husband had shared with her as part of the daily curre
ncy of their faux marital intimacy?

  Poe asked, “Before you tell me what you learned about the families of the kids in the tomb, can I guess how you got it?” He wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass. He was trying to minimize Dee’s sense of betrayal. If he could frame the data she got from Jerry so that it seemed less valuable than it was, she might feel less guilty about sharing it with him.

  It was partially a selfish quest. Life always seemed better for Poe when Dee was less tormented about Jerry.

  She lowered the scotch, took a sip of the ginger ale. “Sure, go for it.”

  Poe said, “Parents of the kids who walked out alive know something . . . that was valuable to the unsub. They gave up what they know. He released their kids. And they’re not talking to the sheriff because it’s been made clear to them that the threat to their children does not expire.”

  Other than the anguish etched in her eyes, Dee’s face remained without expression.

  Poe went on. “But the parents of the kids who were murdered broke one of the unsub’s rules. They either went ahead and talked to the sheriff. Or they didn’t give the unsub what he wants.”

  “Close,” she said.

  “Close? What am I missing?”

  “At least two of the dead kids’ parents kept all the unsub’s rules, but their children were killed anyway.”

  Poe turned his head toward her. Thought about it for a moment. He said, “I don’t get it.”

  Her voice was low. “This is me, okay? Just me.”

  She wanted a reply. Poe said, “Yeah. You.” Not Jerry.

  “I have to conclude the parents didn’t have anything valuable to trade. That they aren’t connected. The father of one of the dead kids is a plastic surgeon in LA. Big house in the Palisades—he apparently has SoCal plastic surgery money—but that’s it. The other dead kid’s mother—he’s a financial aid kid, she’s a single mom—is a municipal bus driver in Fargo, North Dakota. Waking up Thursday, she knew nothing more than the Fargo bus schedule and that she had a brilliant, charming son she cherished and adored.”

  “Fargo?” Poe said. “The kid in the hockey rink?”

  “That one.”

  “Shit. The ones who were released? Do we know what they gave up?”

  “No, but they had stuff to trade. Partial list? Try this on. One’s grandfather owns controlling interest in a company that floats half the barge traffic on the Mississippi River. One’s father is COO at Bell South. Another’s is a senior officer in the Army Corps of Engineers. One’s mother is the top-ranking woman at ConAgra. Another’s mother is a researcher in a CDC BSL-four lab in Fort Collins, Colorado.”

  “BSL?”

  “Biosafety level. Four is highest. Think ebola, SARS. Biohazards with a capital B.”

  “What a list. What do you think, Dee? Is this as bad as it looks? What do you think they gave up to save their kids?”

  “At this point, we have to use our imaginations. Just with that little group? Maybe . . . a simple but effective way to sabotage the locks and shut down barge traffic on the Mississippi during harvest . . . The soft spots in our nationwide telecommunications architecture . . . The most vulnerable locations in our levee system or the identities of our least secure dams . . . Imaginative ways to contaminate the nation’s food supply . . . The soft underbelly of the recent global financing fix. An exploitable weakness in our infectious disease containment architecture.”

  Poe said, “Ammunition.”

  Dee said, “Yeah. Good ammunition, baby. But the reality is we’re left to guess because none of the families are talking. I’m sure the guy has threatened to go after the kids again if the parents talk to us.” She touched Poe on the wrist. “What was up with the secretary of the army’s son? He came out and went back in. What did that mean?”

  Poe didn’t have an answer.

  Dee sipped from the bottle again. She changed her tone. “You found your out-of-town cop, Poe. He told you some of what’s been going on, right? You didn’t cover all this ground on your own.”

  Deirdre was smart. Poe had had no doubt she would figure that out. He was about to tell her all about Purdy anyway. “Ran into him sitting at the bar in the hotel. Turns out that the parents of one of the hostages sent him here to eyeball things.”

  “Is he yours? Or did the surveillance team get him first?”

  “For now, he’s mine. If SSG is still watching him, I’m missing it. That’s certainly possible. The cop is sharp and he’s . . . honorable. He’s not going to reveal anything that puts the kid at risk. He hasn’t told me what kid, or what family. But he told me the logistics about how it all came down earlier in the week.”

  “And you left him alone in the hotel?”

  “I put the fear of surveillance in him. He also knows I’ll burn him if he doesn’t play nice. The screwiest thing? He used the same word I used with you earlier, Dee. He called the kids ‘ammunition.’ ”

  She blinked twice. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “That’s scary,” she said. “Someone who thinks like you.” Then she smiled.

  Poe freeze-dried the smile. Stashed it someplace safe in his memory. Thought he’d thaw it out for his birthday.

  Dee asked, “Did the parents he’s working for cooperate with the unsub?”

  “I think they did, but I don’t know. Get this: The cop—I had my assistant run him, he’s a detective on suspension from the Boulder, Colorado, PD—says the information from the parents he’s working for conceivably puts thirty million lives at risk.”

  “Suspension?” she asked.

  “Not important,” Poe said.

  Dee faced him. “Did you really just say thirty million?”

  “I did. It’s a long shot—the guy says the parent considers the degree of difficulty to use the information sky-high. He said there’s a one in ten million chance of anyone making it work. And he denies imminent danger—says there’s no concern it’s something that can be thrown together next week or next year. But that potential casualty number is chilling, even to me. It exceeds anything I’ve run across since I started this job. Hell, Dee, it might exceed the sum of everything I’ve run across since I started this job.”

  “Thirty million?” Dee said. Her gaze was straight ahead but it was focused on infinity. “Holy. How do you kill thirty million Americans, Poe? You’d need a multi-warhead ICBM, pinpoint targeting, and perfect winds. Hell, you’d need to hijack a fleet of Tridents.”

  “I don’t know, Dee. Guy hasn’t told me yet. My brain can’t figure it out. Does he have a way to cause a meltdown in a nuclear reactor? In the right location, would that do it? I don’t think it would.” He touched her cheek to get her attention. “How about a meteor strike? That could do it. Did somebody figure out a way to steer meteors while I wasn’t paying attention? I am praying that the guy’s just damn wrong.”

  Poe hadn’t actually prayed to God since April of 1995. His last conscious prayer occurred before his head had cleared that morning, and long before the dust had settled in the Murrah Building.

  Poe considered it an unanswered prayer.

  He had hoped Dee would say something that would convince him how wrong he was about the thirty million. But she seemed lost in her own dark vision of the future. He couldn’t tell whether the view from her stool was as calamitous as the view from his. Poe rarely insisted that Dee share his perch, or his perspective. He didn’t insist on much, with Deirdre.

  With no warning, he suddenly felt himself begin to slide. Poe could hear his recent words still reverberating in his ears as though he’d spoken them inside a fat pipe.

  Dee sensed something, too. She heard him beginning to submerge.

  He tried to come back, to crawl out of the tunnel. He said, “When we met—you and me, baby—the nation was feeling that what had just happened in Oklahoma City was the worst thing imaginable. Remember that? What it was like those first few days after the bombing? The magnitude of it all? A hundred and sixty-eight people had died. It was an
epic tragedy. It caused us all to take stock. As people. As a country. We were all trying to find some big collective mirror to look into. But somehow . . . before too long Oklahoma City wasn’t monumental anymore. By 2001, we looked back, and it was just one hundred and sixty-eight folks who died. That’s what, one seven-fifty-seven’s worth? Now, fifteen years later, the bombing has become a quaint tragedy.”

  Dee reached over. She took his hand to steady him, and to steel herself for what she feared might be coming. Poe rarely talked about Oklahoma City. He never talked about the people who died that day.

  He never, ever minimized the significance of that grievous loss. Of the endless mourning.

  She knew he wasn’t done.

  “Here it is, all these years later, and you and I are sitting together in a, frankly, very confusing bar in New Haven, Connecticut, trying to figure out how some asshole locked inside a secret society tomb might be planning to kill thirty million Americans.

  “What happened to us, Dee? This country. This world. What went wrong? How the fuck did we get here?”

  APRIL 19-20, OVERNIGHT SATURDAY INTO SUNDAY

  NEW HAVEN

  From the moment on Saturday afternoon that the man in the tomb sent the secretary of the army’s kid out to direct that she be sent back into the game from the sidelines, Christine Carmody decided that she had no choice but to interpret the instruction about her literally. The words the kid spoke were:. . . the original hostage negotiator will resume her role. She will stay there for the duration.

  Her role is hostage negotiator.

  There is Grove Street in front of the tomb.

  The duration is until this situation gets resolved.

  That’s what the man in the tomb wants. That’s what he gets.

  In the earliest minutes of Sunday, shortly after midnight, Christine begs a cot from one of the fire department rescue crews. She sets it up in the middle of Grove Street, directly in line with the door of the Book & Snake tomb. It’s the exact spot where she was standing while she first spoke to Jonathan Simmons on Saturday morning. It’s the spot where she was standing when each of the other kids came out the door.